


Ridiculous

by KateAtTheClose



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Military, BAMF!John, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-04
Updated: 2012-12-04
Packaged: 2017-11-20 06:35:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/582354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KateAtTheClose/pseuds/KateAtTheClose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John is the best retrieval expert the British Army has, and so naturally it's him that's sent in when some man with little sense of self-preservation keeps getting himself taken hostage - again, and again, and again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ridiculous

**Author's Note:**

> For this prompt at sherlockbbc_fic: http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/3114.html?thread=7949098, based on this music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AhU12zC8fc.

John didn't know what the hell it was about army medics. Show up with some documentation signed by the Royal Army Medical Corps, and you were ushered into whatever unit or company you showed up at the figurative door of with open arms. They didn't even read the specifications about his qualifications or the reason for the transfer, they just nodded at the letterhead, slapped him on the shoulder and pointed him towards the nearest chap gushing blood. 

 

Perhaps it said more about the pressing need for medics on frontlines than anything else. He certainly wasn't complaining, as it was a convenient way for him to nip in and out of various zones with no questions asked. It was also rather nice to do some doctoring again - all those years at medical school were more or less useless in his current line or work, what with all the highly confidential missions and direct government orders and whatnot.

 

Another ongoing wonder of the job was why top-secret operatives still felt like they needed to be masters of disguise. Surely they could just pop by in a generic uniform or pass it over in code or something - John wasn't an expert in codebreaking and subterfuge for nothing, after all - but no, they insisted on alerting him to new orders while masquerading as old women, sheep herders, and privates with gaping wounds spurting more fake blood than a terrible horror film.

 

Today it was a blind man with a small Afghani child. It was an impressive makeup job on the operative, to be sure, but just where he collected the wide-eyed and hungry looking kid was somewhat suspect.

 

“This won’t be your usual hostage negotiation.” The operative warned quietly as John turned away from the closed curtain and lifted the child up to a table to give it a work-over. He didn’t really need to – the act only really continued until the curtain was drawn – but the child wasn’t exactly a glowing picture of health and John could multitask far past this. 

 

“Right,” John said dryly, because if there was one thing he knew about hostage negotiations, it was that they rarely stuck to the textbook norm. In fact, when they brought him in, it was less of a negotiation and more of a forceful extraction. The operative itched under his turban irritably, and John wondered with amusement if he’d picked up the child’s extravagant case of lice. 

 

“Word from the top is that the man you’re after is probably already dead.” 

 

John raised his eyebrows, glancing up from where he was bent over with his stethoscope. “Who’s the mark?” 

 

The operative scratched a little more persistently. “British citizen. He’s important.”

 

They wouldn’t be sending in the British Army’s top retrieval expert if he wasn’t, but John wasn’t enough of a tosser to say that out loud.

 

-

 

Seventeen hours later, John was pressed up against a wall in the Afghani equivalent of a warehouse in Jalalabad, the pulwar he’d nicked and taken a liking to a familiar weight in his right hand, and the pin of a grenade in his teeth. He craned around the corner, gaging distance, velocity and the proximity of his black-clothed opponents – why didn’t anyone ever go for a more upbeat color scheme? – and moved across the doorway, throwing the grenade as he went.

 

Sure enough, three seconds later the L109A1 exploded and the fragments burst out of the steel shell, the noise causing alarmed shouts in the rest of the building and footsteps thundering towards him as the remaining men discovered him. It all played nicely into his own needs; he couldn’t get out the way he came in, and drawing them towards him was convenient enough. But first, he needed to get the mark.

 

He turned around the corner, and in the fading smoke he could make out the discarded bodies of the captors tossed out of the way like rag dolls and a pale man with dark, shaggy hair tied to a chair. Even showing obvious signs of having been beaten, he wasn’t sagging against his restraints but still held mostly upright by long, lithe limbs. Light, intelligent eyes met his, and John got the distinct impression that he was being sized up even while he heard the terribly unsubtle sound of footsteps approaching. He didn’t even have to turn to guide his pulwar into the pathetically unprotected torso of the man behind him.

 

Without a glance at the body that he tugged the sword out of, he moved towards the Brit and sliced his bonds with the ever-handy blade. 

 

“Good afternoon.” John said briskly, tugging the man to his feet, where he faintly towered over him.  

 

“How very interesting.” The dark-haired man said, sounding vaguely fascinated. John just kept a hold and brandished the pulwar to take down the two men who walked through the door.

 

-

 

It was indeed a more interesting extraction than most, if only for the utter lack of whimpering, crying, or hysterics that you generally were to expect from those kidnapped and tortured. Indeed, the man was practically silent, except for the occasional  _“there’s two more in the room across the hall”_  or  _“he’s weak on the left side”_  that John just assumed to show the man had been taking mental notes about his captors and was planning on writing a book about the whole damn thing or something. 

 

When John placed the man in the British army jeep, giving a solid nod to Jeffries, the man who’d be taking the mark from here while he got back to his doctoring, a pale hand with long, slender fingers grasped his arm, stopping him from moving away.

 

“Wait, where are you going?” The man asked, curiosity practically a living thing in his eyes.

 

“I’ve got to go. Getting shocky now, are you? And you’ve been doing so well.  Jeffries has a blanket in his pack if you’d like. You’ll be taken care of.” John said, somewhat surprised. The man had seemed the furthest thing from traumatized thus far. Victims did tend to take to the one they perceived as having rescued them, but John had been told to get back to his unit as soon as possible, which meant he had another job on the way. 

 

“I don’t need a blanket, I’m not in shock.” The man seemed affronted by the very idea. “You’ve clearly had Special Forces training, and are in the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, if I’m not mistaken. And yet you work on your own, implying you are affiliated with them but not a publicly acknowledged member. Those trousers and that undershirt are, however, military issue, but with all identifying insignia removed. Your movements are calculated and your actions steady, and you’ve clearly been doing this for years.” He paused and took a breath, and Jeffries sniggered behind John. 

 

There really wasn’t anything to say to that which wasn’t classified. And yet, he felt that if he didn’t say something as this juncture the man would continue. “Have a lovely trip home.” He turned, walking away to the motorcycle he’d driven here, and he could feel eyes boring into his back. Now it was his turn to be the curious one.

 

-

 

A month later, the operative was in a shuttlecock burqa. John gave a long-suffering sigh, and ushered her – him, from that deep voice, it must be a him – into the med tent.

 

“Same British civilian, different place.” Was the first thing the operative said, in a low baritone of a voice, speaking in terse Persian. “High risk assessment, low chance of live retrieval.” 

 

Well, it was straight and to the point. John could respect that. “Why is he so important?” He couldn’t resist asking, accordingly in Persian, knowing the likelihood of getting a straight answer.

 

“He has answers.” The burqa bobbed, and John resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Didn’t matter what branch of the military you were, you never got a straight answer about the hows and whys. Still, when he thought about the tall, dark-haired man with the quick, bright eyes, he couldn’t help wanting a few answers himself.

 

-

 

Twenty hours later, he was in an abandoned, bombed-out hospital in Charikar, clinging to the inside of an empty elevator shaft, rappelling down a rope towards where the mark was being held. He could hear a voice carrying up towards him, a British accent that John recognized as the same mark as before.

 

“You clearly have not been taught correctly how to do this.” The British voice sounded faintly amused, even if John could detect an undercurrent of pain. “It’s all wrong. Have you done this before, or am I your test-case?”

 

There was the sound of something, metal on metal, and the faint splash of water, then the clang of a discarded metal bucket. John heard spluttering, and the voice pick up again. “You haven’t even gotten the wires attached to maximize their capacity. Honestly, have you even  _seen_  parilla before?” John was suddenly sure why the British government had such low expectations of this mark's ability to survive containment – he seemed to be missing the gene for self-preservation and the knowledge that it wasn’t a good idea to provoke your captors.

 

Unfortunately, John didn’t get a chance to hear their response, as he was in range to toss down a screening smoke grenade. He heard the hiss of its activation, the rope already wound around his legs and braced on the wall, and didn’t waste any time in leaning his head down and out into the opening, pulling his pistol from where it was holstered on his back and, hanging upside down, shot both men squarely in the head. 

 

Two old bed frames were pressed up against the wall, and the tall, pale, dark-haired mark, looking bruised and battered, was strung up with his arms spread and wrists tied securely down, giving John a growing smile. Equipment, medical and electrical, was scattered around, the bucket lying discarded nearby, and a control box connecting the wall socket to the metal clamps attached to the bed. 

 

“You’re right, this is a shoddy job.” John acknowledged, unwrapping his legs with a flick of the knot and easily dropping down to his feet. Even if the mark’s eyes hadn’t flicked to behind John, he would have heard the third captor coming up behind him. It was easy enough to deliver him a vicious elbow jab to where he estimated the man’s face to be.

 

“They didn’t even have electrodes.” The mark said, sounding pleasantly baffled at his captor’s inadequacy and not the least concerned that he just narrowly missed a good shock to the system. Even with this set up, it would still have plenty hurt.

 

He slipped his knife out of his boot and cut down the ropes holding the man’s hands in place. The mark winced at their release, rubbing at his wrists even as he veered over to take a closer look at the equipment. 

 

“Come on, then.” John said, absolutely no idea what he was to make of this chap. Sociopathic tendencies, definitely, as John had the unnerving feeling that he’d be going home and making his own set up, if only to prove that he could do it better. 

 

As he shot down the last few men, the mark stuck close and was as helpful in pointing out details and hints to his opponents as before. There was a jeep waiting, as there eventually always was, with ever-reliable Jeffries there in the driver’s seat tossing him a salute.

 

John escorted the mark into the waiting seat, and was yet again aware of the man’s intense scrutiny. He was sure he couldn’t be much to look at, with the sweat, dirt, grime, and scrapes that one accumulated whilst frequenting abandoned elevator shafts. “Yes?” He said, expectantly. “Going to tell me more about myself?” He wouldn’t mind, not really. He kept so many secrets that there was something immensely gratifying about having the truth told in a way he couldn’t be court martialed for. And he was fascinated by the way this man could tell all that just from looking at him.

 

“I could. Or you could tell me something I don’t know.” The man said, wide mouth quirking into a challenging smile.

 

“Depends what it is.” John hedged, and unintentionally sounding coy as a result. 

 

“Your name.”

 

John blinked, and shoved a hand down the close-cropped hair on the back of his head and down onto his grimy neck. As it turned out, that might be the only thing he  _could_  tell him. John Watson was just an army medic, often transferred and with a commendable record, if not an extraordinary one. It was his code name that was the secret, the name that if tied to his identity would spell chaos. 

 

“John.” He said, and put his hand out for the customary shake. “And yours?” While it wasn’t official orders that he not know the names of his marks, be they for rescue or assassination, the powers that be thought it best that he know the least amount possible about his own operations – all the better to save their own asses if he were to ever get caught and tortured. As if John would ever let  _that_  happen. 

 

“Sherlock Holmes.” The man said concisely, giving his hand a firm shake. “The world’s only consulting detective.” 

 

There seemed few more outlandish things one could say at the side of a dusty road in Charikar, but John was sure he could think of something were he to set his mind to it. Also, it seemed others didn’t hold back quite so much as he did in declaring that they were the best at what they did. Each to one’s own, he supposed. 

 

“Pleasure.” John said, politely, and then Jeffries was revving up the jeep and Sherlock Holmes was lost in a cloud of dust. 

 

-

 

When an operative appeared again three weeks later, looking not quite miserable enough to truly pass as a man with dysentery, John somehow knew, even despite the myriad of missions he was sent on almost weekly, that this one would involve Sherlock. Sure enough, he was yet again in peril.

 

“Probably already dead. You know how he is.” The operative said candidly, and John honestly didn’t know how to refute that, or quite why he wanted to. 

 

“He does have a way with people.”  

 

-

 

When he found Sherlock on the outskirts of Sari Pul two days later, the man was locked in a cell with no less than seventeen Taliban-related captors milling about outside. When he’d kicked down the door and blown his way in, he pulled the heavy door open and looked in to where Sherlock was waiting cross-legged inside. 

 

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” John said, since he’d always had a penchant for bad jokes. 

 

“Give me more than a cover to work with, and we might. Although it an interesting contradiction that you are also a doctor.” Sherlock said pensively over steepled fingers.

 

“Figure it all out from one of the most common first names in the English-speaking world, did you?” It was admittedly impressive – John had always been more of a man of action, himself. He could speak a handful of languages, sure, but he didn’t care enough for the technological side of things to go into espionage, even if they had tried awfully hard to recruit him into the program. 

 

“Please.” There was disdain in that. “I only had to narrow it down minutely to let the deductions do the trick. Once I eliminate the impossible, the truth is just there, waiting to be found.” 

 

“Speaking of things waiting to be found,” John said moving to the side of the doorway so Sherlock could exit the tiny cell. “Surely there’s a self-defence class or something that you could take. This is getting ridiculous.” 

 

Sherlock sent him a look as he walked past, and it was oddly like a child looking at a particularly interesting puzzle. They walked in silence, John perfectly capable of retracing his steps despite the labyrinth-like building. Sherlock was a tall, bright-eyed presence at his side, and John had the distinct impression that he was waiting for him to pause in confusion at a crossroads. From the way that Sherlock’s eyes slipped to him, as they approached, then gave a minute nod of satisfaction when he jolly well carried on his way, the man was goddamn testing him. Which took some gall, all right, and John chose to ignore it, partly because he rather liked the odd sense that he was being approved of. 

 

When two men with swords rushed at them near the exit, John automatically both manoeuvred Sherlock behind him and with a flash had his pulwar sharp and ready in his hand. John blocked one blade with a powerful shove, knocking it against the other and causing the second man to stumble off balance, using his own momentum to drag the blade back across the first attacker’s exposed abdomen, kicking the foreign blade away when it fell from suddenly-numb fingers. He whirled on the second man, ready for the attack that he assumed, based on estimated recovery time, was imminent, but instead found Sherlock grappling with the captor, face set in determination. With a few sturdy whacks against the wall, the sword clattered to the ground. John flipped his pulwar over and brought the hilt of it down on the man’s temple, causing him to crumple beneath Sherlock. 

 

Sherlock looked down at him, stepped away, wiped his hands vaguely on his trousers, and looked up at John with what could only be described as a self-satisfied smirk. John smiled faintly back, wondering why if the man wasn’t afraid to tackle sword-carrying Taliban, he couldn’t god damn well keep himself out of trouble for more than a few weeks at a time. He didn’t ask, though. He assumed it was poor form to criticise victims for their abilities to not get taken hostage. 

 

* * *

 

A week and a half later, he was driving a hotwired, beat up pickup truck down a dark street at two in the morning in one of the shadier districts of Herat, flooring the gas pedal and causing a man to flip up over the hood, the rifle he’d been holding chipping the windshield and a spider web of cracks blossoming outwards. Of all the places for what the operative had irritatingly called his “damsel in distress” to be currently held, of  _course_  it had to be the city in which Afghanistan’s new central government was making themselves cosy. John liked a good challenge and all, but if this was going to become a weekly thing, then he was going to politely ask Sherlock to please not get taken hostage in cities regularly patrolled by the Afghan National Army, the Afghan National Police and the International Security Force. John was good and all, damn good, but there was only so much you could ask of him on a regular basis. 

 

Another man came rushing at the open driver’s side window, and John didn’t hesitate to flip up his dagger and stop the man in his tracks with a slash across his throat. Then he threw his weight to the side and kicked open the passenger side door, knocking over another man who’d been levelling a gun. As he swung himself out of the door, he ducked under a sword blade, grabbing his opponent’s wrist as he heard movement behind him and turned to see the man from the door had abandoned his gun and was now wielding a knife. He delivered a roundhouse kick solidly to the newcomer’s side, and as he thudded against the wall John shifted his grip on the swordsman, and punched him once, twice, all right then, three times before he dropped like a bag of bricks. 

Then he was hugging the wall and up the stairs, quiet as anything, and John pulled the pulwar from where it was strapped to his back and held it ready, all his stealth training coming second nature to him now as he moved silently through doorways and around corners. He was ready when another swordsman rushed him from an adjoining room, deflecting the blade with his own and forcing him back, blades crashing until the man tripped on something, the tip of his sword flicking John’s cheekbone –  _damn_  – and then the man crashed into and through a window, landing in a deep, cavernous warehouse of a room with a pathetic sounding thud and the shattering splash of glass. 

 

John stepped up to the window, eyes raising from the body on the ground to the figure of something – some _one_  – hanging upside down from the roof. Upside down in a straight jacket, with dark hair a smudge beneath and just the faintest glint of two very intelligent light eyes watching his every move, John was not too surprised to see Sherlock. John tilted his head, fascinated and faintly amused, as if getting incrementally closer to Sherlock’s inverted degree would make this any less ridiculous. Sherlock smiled, perhaps a bit tighter than John thought it otherwise might’ve been if the blood wasn’t rushing quite so much to his head. 

 

“You may go ahead with your pithy one-liner of questionable humour now, John.” Sherlock informed him succinctly, his face no longer pale but an attractive shade of tomato.  

 

“Well, if you’re just hanging around.” John said obligingly, with his unapologetically bad sense of humour. Still, it was somewhat uninspiring to be met with nothing but a resounding silence, even if the only individual who didn’t currently wish to kill him in a one-mile radius was strapped upside down into a straight jacket. 

 

“Alright, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, would you mind hurrying up and cutting me down? You may not be familiar with reverse physiology, but with this amount of pressure in the veins of my head, I stand a fair chance of getting a blood clot that will swell my brain, make me go blind, or give me a stroke.” Sherlock did admittedly sound rather strained, but John had already evaluated various strategies for getting him down and had his dagger held loosely in his hand, ready to throw. “Unlike most of humanity, I use my brain quite a lot, and would very much rather that it remains intact.” 

 

John nodded, letting the slight to humanity’s intelligence as a whole slide, a smile tilting up his lips. He kicked broken glass out of the way with his boot and stepped up on the window ledge. “You know already how this is going to go, don’t you?” He asked, curious. He wasn’t too afraid for Sherlock’s brain power, as he did, in fact, know about reverse physiology, having not ignored the vascular aspect of medical school. Additionally, he was no stranger to torture techniques, and his brief on the situation had Sherlock up there within an acceptable time period.

 

“Of course.” Sherlock sounded almost offended. “You throw your little knife, and I fall ground-wards, and you hopefully don’t let me break my neck on contact with the floor.” 

 

There was something decidedly undignified about ‘little knife’, but John’s masculinity wasn’t in any danger of being affronted. 

 

“Alright then.” He said, really quite pleasantly, and flipped the blade around to hold it by the tip between his first two fingers and his thumb. “Heads up,” He added, if only for the glare and hint of smile he got from Sherlock. Then the blade was sailing, end over end, towards the rope tied around Sherlock’s feet, and John had dropped to a crouch on the ground beneath the window, broken glass slicing open his palm, and he sprang up to cover the ground between where he was and where Sherlock was plummeting towards the floor. 

 

In the end, it was very much like a tackle, and he tucked his head in, and wrapped his arms around the body he was supposed to be cushioning, and then they collided with the floor, and there was the sickening sound of his ribs cracking and the sharp pain that accompanied it. He didn’t move for a moment, attempting to recover his breath despite the whole rib difficulty, firmly underneath the long, lithe bundle of encased limbs that was Sherlock. Just before he’d gathered up the breath to ask if Sherlock was alright, the man had rolled off of him and was wiggling his way around to face John. 

 

“Oh good,” The man said, peering at him, less red now but still flushed. “Thought you’d died as a mattress.” 

 

“For queen and country and all that.” John said, sounding as squashed as he felt.  

 

“Erm,” Sherlock said, and it was the least concise thing that John had ever heard him say. “Thank you.” 

 

John blinked at him, thinking this was a fine time in the history of his rescuing Sherlock for thanks to start coming into the fold, but he certainly wasn’t going to turn them away. “All part of the job,” John tried to say nonchalantly, and came out sounding like a twat.

 

Then he was pushing himself painstaking up, since even though clearly no one had been alerted by the fall to come and have a go at them with a gun or a sword yet, they still might, and moved to collect his knife from where it had fallen. He slashed away the binds on his legs and the ties holding the jacket closed, and together they moved towards the door. 

 

-

 

The sun was rising up over the nondescript buildings of Herat when John got the old, beat up, still hotwired pickup on the road. They weren’t home clear, far from it, but John hadn’t gone in without an exit strategy – he knew which back roads to take, who to bribe, who to kill to skip all the checkpoints and not put up any alarms. Beside him, Sherlock was reluctantly dozing off against the seat, head tilted back and chin up. As John steered around a pretty impressive pothole, the motion of the truck sent Sherlock sliding down against John’s shoulder. John looked down, saw his long, dark eyelashes and the smudges of bruises and exhaustion under them, and reached up, ignoring the pull on his ribs, and wrapped his arm around him.

 

-

 

They reached the meeting point, but Jeffries’ jeep and his own motorcycle weren’t alone. Still, he didn’t see any of the nearly imperceptible signals that would indicate that this was anything not government mandated. There was a man in an impeccable and very expensive-looking suit, accompanied by four thoroughly armed and reasonably high-ranking British army soldiers, clearly currently being utilized as bodyguards. 

 

Beside him, the recently poked-awake Sherlock made a very distinct noise of irritation. “Know him, do you?” John said mildly. 

 

“He’s my brother.” Sherlock said, clearly currently none too pleased about it.

 

John really shouldn’t have been surprised that Sherlock Holmes would manage to have a family squabble on the outskirts of a city in Afghanistan.

 

John got out of the truck, moving around to hold the door open for Sherlock. The well-dressed man was watching him with that same unequivocal look of calculating interest. John stared resolutely back, nothing less than the respectful nondescript look on his face that one learned rather quickly in the army. 

 

“I could not be more delighted to meet the inestimable John Watson. Just fascinating how much more you are than just the doctor we have you as on paper.”

 

John just tilted his head slightly, acknowledging the comment without validating it in any way. 

 

“Ah, I see why he likes you.” The man said, smiling like the cat with the canary. 

 

Beside him, Sherlock seemed to be rubbing his forehead irritably. “Oh yes, interfering, as usual. What a change.” 

 

“Really, Sherlock, traipsing around London after serial killers and master thieves is one thing, but getting yourself purposefully captured time and time again in a warzone for a silly crush really is making it a bit thick. You’ve always had a bit of difficulty gaging normalcy, but this is just ridiculous.” He was just exuding exasperation. “And, come now, you know how I worry.” And, alright, a fair amount of condescension.

 

Wait, hold on now, what was that about a crush? Beside him, Sherlock was statue-still and glaring silently.

 

“Doctor Watson, you’ve been reassigned.” The man in the suit said, abruptly switching his focus back from Sherlock to John. Sherlock suddenly seemed to perk up.

 

“I beg your pardon?” John asked, to his credit not sounding nearly as incredulous as he felt. 

 

“Come now, doctor. We both know you’re not as dumb as you look, or Sherlock here would have just flown back to merry old England after that slight hang-up with the diamonds.” John supposed that was supposed to be a compliment, but he was more interested in the explanation as to why Sherlock had been tied to a chair and beaten in the first place. “Due to recent…” his eyes flicked to Sherlock, and then pointedly back to John. “Complications with state relations, Sherlock is no longer allowed in the country. He’s also been declared a wanted fugitive by some of Afghanistan’s more serious criminal organizations, a status that will most likely follow him back to London. He needs a body guard, and I want only the best for my family.” The man smiled serenely. “And I have my connections, so I  _get_  the best for my family.”

 

“Mycroft, you haven’t possibly.” And was Sherlock sounding  _delighted_? Out of the corner of his eye, John saw Sherlock had his hands clasped together like he’d just been given a puppy for Christmas. John wisely chose not to follow that analogy through to its logical conclusion.

 

“Also, bringing you back to London will keep my dear brother from putting himself in harms way every other week in hopes of seeing you again.” Mycroft admitted, and John saw that self-satisfaction was a family trait. 

 

“Two birds with one stone.” John summarized, and thought he should probably be a little bit more upset about this. He was the best the British army had, after all, and it wasn’t pride so much as the obvious truth that he would be bloody impossible to replace. But even with the explosions and the swordfights and the masters of disguise, his life had gotten pretty dull, all things considered. 

 

He turned to Sherlock, believing truly for the first time that he might actually be the world’s only consulting detective. “You really chase down serial killers and master thieves?”

 

Sherlock fairly grinned. “Only the very smart ones.”

 

And that could be pretty exciting, too.

 

-

 

“So, honestly, you kept getting yourself captured because you wanted to  _date_  me?” John reclined in a chair that he was quickly becoming possessive of in 221B Baker Street, trying to keep the laughter from escaping and mostly failing, causing his cracked ribs to announce their displeasure with sharp, tugging pain. Some body guard he made, at present, but Mycroft had made no secret of the extra surveillance they were under while he recuperated. Still, some adrenaline and his pulwar in hand, and he could make a bloody good go of it if necessary. 

 

Sherlock stood in front of the mantelpiece, hands clasped behind his back, but when he looked over his shoulder at John he was smiling slightly. John rather liked seeing him smile without having to immediately release him from bonds of some sort. He much preferred, too, the unmarred expanse of pale skin beneath those light, bright eyes. 

 

“Well, I certainly didn’t do it for the hospitality.” Sherlock said with disdain.

 

John gave a huff of a laugh, and reached awkwardly for his teacup, face purposefully devoid of the wince as his ribs complained again. Then Sherlock was suddenly there, leant down, his hand around the warm cup and brushing John’s as he passed it to him. His light eyes flicked up and met John’s gaze, and then their lips were pressed together, the teacup warm and held steady between them. 

 

When breath became a pressing issue, they broke apart, but Sherlock remained where he was crouched down at the edge of John’s chair. “You know, I didn’t really fancy the weather, either.” 

 

John smiled, and sipped his tea.  


End file.
